deep trough. The fragile shell split, and Morris, securely fastened to the seat, had to decide whether to sink with his pants on or swim without them. Ob- viously, as he always says when he tells the story, he swam. Morris's recollections of his Yale pro- fessors run more to chance meetings on the golf course than to scheduled meet- ings in the classroom. The univer- sity links were opened while he was a student, and he feels that this may ex- plain why his scholastic attainments were less spectacular than they might have been. He took the famous course in Tennyson and Browning under \Villiam Lyon Phelps, but he and his instructor were not on very cordial terms until they found that they made a companionable and evenly matched twosome. Morris graduated in 1925, and he entered the Law School the fol- lowing autumn, largely, he says, because of a sense of inevitability. He had little interest in the law, and his only intellect- ual stimulation came from reading the graceful language in the decisions of ] udge Learned Hand, the ac- complished prose writer of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals. Two years ago, Judge Hand's daughter, Constance, became Morris's second wife. His first wife was the former Margaret Copley Thaw, whom he married in 1928, during his final year in law school. They set up light house- keeping in New Haven. She played golf and studied por- traiture at the Yale Art School; he played golf and occasionall v worked on his torts. When he got his law degree, they took a trip to Egypt and then set- tled down in New York. Mor- ris's father died that year, and he stepped in to his father's place in the law firm of Morris & McVeigh, taking over a prac- tice which consisted largely of looking after the estates of oth- er members of the Morris so- cial set. Reflecting on this phase of his career, Morris points to two circumstances that probably had llluch to do with his present in- terest in good war ks. One time a doctor, after examining him, said he was a hypothyroid and prescribed an extract to com- pensate for hIs glandular defi- ciency. This treatment gave him a nervous energy that he had to work off somehow. At about the same time, his wife began to develop great proficiency at contract bridge. She rose quickly into the Vanderbilt Cup class while he was still trying to fathom the meaning of a dem<;ìnd bid. When his wife became involved in bridge tourna- ments a large part of the time, he began to spend many of his free evenings and much of his new energy at the Re- publican Club of the Fifteenth As- sembly, or Silk Stocking, District. Mor- ris, whose father had been president of the club, became a diligent party work- er-arranging balls, raising funds, and, on election days, looking after voters' babies. Once he stood guard over a number of corpses while the employees of an undertaking establishment went to the polls. He assumed that they were <::::Þ 29 voting the straight Republican ticket, but when they returned, hours later, they told him, with the perverse humor of the mortician, that they had enjoyed the free afternoon and had voted for the Ne\\T Deal. O NE night in 1932, at the apartment of the Adolph Berles, Morris met Fiorello LaGuardia, who had recently been defeated for reëlection to Con- gress, and LaGuardia's talk about what he hoped to do for New York some day made a deep impression on him. Morris was in a sense responsible for LaGuardia's being elected Mayor. In 1933, Morris reached the presIdency of